Efforts are underway to develop technologies capable of detecting the presence of materials that may be placed inside a container for purposes of transporting the material to a destination. Examples of harmful materials that may be most important to identify are radioactive, explosive, biological, and/or chemical agents.
Current radioisotopic identification is based upon peak-finding and pattern-matching algorithms. These techniques may be sufficient in the laboratory and in some industrial applications (e.g., in commercial nuclear power reactors), but they fall short in attempts to detect shielded radioisotopes, largely because current algorithms do not sufficiently account for the interaction between the emitted radiation and the surrounding matter.
The aforementioned co-pending application presents a system and method for modeling the interaction of radioisotope materials with any shielding material in order to rapidly analyze output of a detector to determine whether a radioisotope material of interest is present in a field of view of the detector. There is room for improving on those techniques, and in particular, for building a reliable library of data representing interactions between radioisotopes of interest and possible materials in any combination.